In January 2009 the three founders of a little-known website called Airbedandbreakfast.com decided at the last minute to attend the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Novel approaches take on food waste (and hunger and GHGs too)

Dollar Amount Put on Cost of Blight to Neighbors

How To Build The Perfect City

THE FUTURE OF CITIES

Why Chicago wants to make mass transit more convenient (and connected)

Chicago Police Routinely Violate Civil Rights, Withering Justice Department Probe Finds

unscheduled absenteeism costs roughly $3,600 per year for each hourly worker and $2,650 each year for salaried employees.

Childcare and eldercare - Employees may be forced to miss work in order to stay home and take care of a child/elder when normal arrangements have fallen through (for example, a sick caregiver or a snow day at school) or if a child/elder is sick.

Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments

Chapter 6 - Urban Transportation

Urban Transportation at the Crossroads

just traveling to a job is a land mine in a city where fractured gangs rule a block at a time

The neighborhood has added nearly 1,000 new jobs in the past three years, thanks to the new Method soap factory, a new Wal-Mart Supercenter and retail strip and an incoming Whole Foods Market distribution center expected to open by the end of 2017, said David Doig, president of Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, the nonprofit developer behind the projects. Another retail center under development, which will include Chipotle and Potbelly restaurants, should add another 30 to 40 jobs, he said.Sixty percent of the jobs have gone to people living within nearby ZIP codes, including many to young people, Doig said. He expects updated youth employment numbers to look much better than the 20 percent drop recorded in the Great Cities report.

what's missing, some workforce experts say, is a large-scale system that connects young people, training programs, employers and transportation that gets everyone where they need to be.

Nearly all of this growth has occurred in metropolitan areas, placing greater pressure on undeveloped land. Since 1950, the share of the country’s population in metropolitan areas has increased from about 65 to 80 percent (Bureau of the Census 1999, 46).

According to a 2013 survey for Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C., members save approximately US $800 annually on transportation costs5. Martin and Shaheen’s (2011) research on carsharing in North America demonstrated that 50% of carsharing members either sold or postponed a car purchase, and for every carsharing vehicle in a fleet, 9 to 13 personal vehicles are taken off the road. Furthermore, of those autos shed, carsharing vehicles average about 10 miles per gallon better on fuel efficiency6.

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 50% of the world lived in urban environments in 2010, and that number is expected to increase to 70% by 20502.

oblessness is concentrated in "economically abandoned sectors of Cook County resulting from deindustrialization," report authors said.

Last year saw highest costs from natural disasters since 2012, according to data from reinsurer Munich Re

Transportation studies put the annual cost of congestion at $160 billion, which includes 7 billion hours of time lost to sitting in traffic and an extra 3 billion gallons of fuel burned.

China has slapped millions of dollars worth of fines on alleged offenders for violating anti-pollution rules, according to state media.

One trend that is helping drive prices beyond the realm of affordability in places like New York and Los Angeles is an influx of foreign buyers of U.S. real estate.

But this trend has put a strain on those cities' real estate markets , because new construction is often unable to keep pace with demand due to geographic constraints, or restrictions imposed by local government regulations.

In December, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for only the second time since 2006, and a majority of the members of the Fed's rate-setting board predict there will be three more increases coming in 2017. These decisions will cause mortgage rates to rise, potentially making it more difficult for prospective homebuyers to be able to afford the home of their dreams.

The most recent homeless count, conducted in January 2015, found 6,686 homeless people in the city. Seventy-one percent of people reported living in San Francisco when they became homeless, up from 61 percent in 2013. Just 10 percent said they were living outside California when they became homeless, and the remaining 19 percent were living in the state but not in the city.