Scores of mid-sized American cities in the 21st century face a profound and similar challenge: confront the relentless march of new highways, sewers, schools, subdivisions, and shopping centers pushing ever further into the countryside and develop a new style of growth that rejuvenates dreary downtowns, adds enduring value to the economy, and enhances opportunity for all citizens. This special reporting series, Growing Grand Rapids, investigates the work underway in one midwestern community — a 2003 All America City Award finalist — to solve sprawl and create a world-class place to learn, live, work, and play.
Rapid bus transit
Wednesday, June 11, 2008 Grand Rapids: Gateway to Michigan’s Transit Success
A promising plan for light rail transit in downtown Detroit is hogging attention, but Grand Rapid’s Bus Rapid Transit proposal is the most important public transportation project in Michigan, according to urban experts. The project is significant because Grand Rapids now has the green light from the Federal Transit Administration which means Michigan has its foot in the door for federal funding for new transit systems.
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Bus rapid transit systems
Thursday, May 01, 2008 Bus Rapid Transit Plan Draws Downtown Dollars
Despite Michigan's many maladies, developer Jonathan Bradford is confidently pushing forward with plans for a multi-million-dollar project in a gritty part of inner city Grand Rapids that suffers from disinvestment, decline, and despair. Some might say he's crazy. But Mr. Bradford, like many other developers and investors here, eagerly anticipates something brand-new to Michigan: a BRT.
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Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell
Tuesday, March 11, 2008 Grand Rapids Tells Lansing: Yes We Can
Michigan's own Henry Ford generated amazing wealth innovating and mass marketing the automobile. But his fortune was an anthill compared to the mountain of money John D. Rockefeller made in the oil business. And therein lies the story of why Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell is staking out what just might be the most aggressive alternative energy platform of any public official in the United States.
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Greman bus rapid transit
Monday, February 04, 2008 Feds OK Grand Rapids’ ‘New Start’ Transit Funds
Just when it seemed Michigan was hitting a dead end on transit, one of the state’s top bus systems got a hot lead on a New Start: Grand Rapids won as much as $29 million from Washington to build the Auto State’s most advanced public transit system. If its “bus rapid transit” system works, it could help similar projects in Detroit, Traverse City, and other Michigan cities.
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Downtown Grand Rapids
Wednesday, July 18, 2007 Jumbo Investments Revitalize Grand Rapids
This city’s elite business leaders and financiers, an unusually collaborative group of immensely wealthy families, have spent a decade combining their capital and imaginations to turn a worn industrial economy into a showcase of technology, research, education, housing, and entertainment. But even considering the recent big investments in new campuses, a civic arena, a convention center, parks, a transit center, and more than 2,800 units of downtown housing, Grand Rapids has never seen anything like the scale of construction occurring on what is now known as “Health Hill.”
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Wednesday, June 13, 2007 From Trolley Talk to Rail Reality?
Rick Gustafson once helped General Motors with automotive research, but today he helps communities build streetcar systems. He comes to Grand Rapids tomorrow to talk to leaders there about installing a downtown streetcar system—something they’ve been discussing for years. Now, with so many other cities putting down trolley tracks, Mr. Gustafson’s appearance begs the question: How long before discussion turns to construction?
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Friday, January 26, 2007 Agency Endorses Grand Rapids Streetcars
Emboldened by rave reviews from a delegation that studied Portland, Oregon's highly successful streetcar system, Grand Rapids’ regional public transit agency has taken another step toward building its own. The agency also has decided to ask local voters to approve a property tax increase to improve existing bus service, and told its staff to pursue federal funding for constructing a new, “rapid bus” system.
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Wednesday, November 29, 2006 The Little Trolley that Could…and Did
Five years after opening North America’s first modern streetcar system, Portland is a furnace of redevelopment, according to Homer Williams, a leading local developer and former trolley skeptic. "This place is on fire," said Mr. Williams, "all because of the streetcar." Now a group of civic leaders from Grand Rapids is headed to Portland to study that city’s trolley-powered success, which currently includes $750 million in new construction.
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Lonely walker
Friday, September 29, 2006 Health Centers and Heavy Traffic
As officials finalize plans for a big road-widening project around Grand Rapid's booming medical center, public officials in some other U.S. cities with similar centers are struggling with the problems that road projects have brought to their own communities. Some seek ways to protect walkers from the heavy traffic flowing around their centers; others are looking for ways to restore the attractiveness and urban vitality that such projects inadvertently pave over.
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Grand Rapids
Saturday, August 26, 2006 What’s Healthy for Health Hill?
Developers are sparing no expense or creativity to build Health Hill, the biotech hub of Grand Rapids’ 21st-century economy and the center of an unprecedented boom of development and technology in the city. But Health Hill also embodies the tension between Grand Rapids’ strides into the knowledge economy and its struggles to build a 21st–century city and transportation system to go with it.
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More of this?
Thursday, August 03, 2006 State Wants More Pavement on Health Hill
State and local transportation officials are pushing an ambitious plan to expand streets, bridges, and a major highway that cuts through the heart of Grand Rapids. But many local officials are wary of the MDOT proposal, which largely ignores the direction that development in Michigan’s second-largest city has taken in recent years—toward high-quality regional transit and more walkable designs.
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Returning to Grand Rapids?
Sunday, April 02, 2006 Kent County May Form Transit Task Force
Responding to a strong push from a long list of community, business, religious, civic, and elected leaders, Roger Morgan, the new chair of the Kent County Board of Commissioners, will soon decide whether his county will conduct a full-scale study of the benefits of building a modern public transit system. The task force proposal is one of 15 that the wide-ranging collection of citizen groups recently presented to the Kent County commissioners.
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Not in Grand Rapids?
Tuesday, February 21, 2006 Will Election Year Politics Derail a New Start?
State Representative Jerry Kooiman has twice asked colleagues in both parties to allow Grand Rapids access to millions in federal funds to build the state’s first rapid transit system in nearly a century. The first time, Representative Kooiman’s bill allowed many other transit systems in Michigan to do the same thing. This time, however, he’s following a much less inclusive track.
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Metro Grand Rapids’ bus system
Tuesday, January 24, 2006 Horse and Buggy or Rail and Streetcar?
With political feuding inside the state Capitol blocking more than $100 million in federal transit funding for three of Michigan’s largest cities, a broad coalition of public interest groups in Grand Rapids have united to introduce a plan for expanding public transportation, stemming traffic congestion, and quickening the pace of economic recovery both in their region and across the state.
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Grand Rapids
Thursday, November 03, 2005 Who Gets to Be a 'Commerce Center'?
Faced with unyielding deficits, some officials are rethinking how best to direct Michigan’s annual $10 billion investment in roads, sewers, and other infrastructure. Critics say that those investments push too much development into the countryside; now one lawmaker has introduced a bill that, depending on its final form, could help to reverse that trend. Tomorrow state leaders, academic experts, and representatives of local governments will discuss his “commerce center” bill at a daylong workshop.
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New station in Grand Rapids
Wednesday, September 28, 2005 Grand Rapids Readies a Transit Summit
With vehicles jamming their streets and highways, members of more than 30 Grand Rapids-area citizen groups and agencies gather on Monday to decide how to reverse the area’s growing dependence on the automobile. Organizers say that their transit summit will reflect a growing consensus that more public transportation will help to build a more prosperous region.
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Coney Girl
Sunday, March 13, 2005 Michigan’s Comeback City
Jennifer Idema opened her Coney Girl hot dog stand in the new, beating heart of downtown Grand Rapids. Starting a new venture in Michigan’s second largest city is a carefully planned career step for Ms. Idema, who says, “People are coming back downtown, so I figured now was a good time to open the business.” While Grand Rapids still has much work to do, few American cities its size have done nearly as well recovering from the familiar cycle of urban decay and despair.
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Urban leadership
Friday, November 12, 2004 East Meets West
Vowing to speed Michigan’s transformation into a global economic power, the mayors of the state’s two largest cities said they are pushing a four-point urban agenda for reviving Michigan cities. Appearing before the Grand Rapids Economic Club, Mayors Kilpatrick and Heartwell said that they would co-chair the Urban Core Mayors group and advance policies that modernize the state’s tax code and boost public transportation, inner city schools, and 21st-century economic opportunities.
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Michigan State House Representative Jerry Kooiman
Wednesday, June 02, 2004 Three Steps to Transit Success
Unlike many of his Republican colleagues in the Michigan State House of Representatives, Jerry Kooiman strongly believes that the state should help finance efficient public transportation systems. He can point to his own experiences: The professorial-looking Mr. Kooiman represents the state’s 75th House District, in Kent County, where one of the best intra-urban bus systems in the state keeps the busses running and increasingly full of satisfied customers. In an interview with the Great Lakes Bulletin News Service, Representative Kooiman explains why he launched the state House Transit Caucus, and what he thinks Detroit must do to turn its transit trials into triumph.
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Downtown Grand Rapids
Sunday, May 16, 2004 Signs of Life for Affordable Housing
Nearly one year after Michigan lawmakers introduced a plan for more affordably priced housing, an alliance of Grand Rapids officials and activists is renewing its drive for the proposed legislation. The drive has convinced one prominent west Michigan lawmaker, state Representative Jerry Kooiman, to urge that the bill be enacted without waiting to identifying a way to pay for it. The bill would spend up to $25 million a year to expand ownership and rental choices for people with limited incomes. The representative’s remarks seemed to reflect the urgency the Kent County group feels about solving the state’s housing problem.
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A place for kids
Thursday, May 06, 2004 Granholm’s Urban Therapy
Michigan Governor Jennifer M. Granholm is attempting through her new Cool City Pilot Program to do the same thing here that Maryland Governor Parris Glendening did in 1997 when he passed the state Smart Growth Act. The Maryland planning and public investment law redirected much of the state's budget for roads, schools, public works and buildings, housing, and other new construction back toward urban centers. Mr. Glendening's program helped Maryland achieve one of the highest levels of economic growth of any state in the nation while conserving thousands of acres of farmland and forest and strengthening economic development in Baltimore, the state's largest city.
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Sign too much of the time
Friday, April 16, 2004 Granholm Vetoes Farmland Tax Bill
Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm has vetoed a bill that critics of the legislation said would have done little to reduce farmers’ taxes but a lot to help developers and land speculators who specialize in converting farmland to subdivisions and shopping malls. Those critics include former Governor William Milliken and former state Attorney General Frank Kelly, who chaired the governor’s Michigan Land Use Leadership Council. The council recommended helping farmers as a way to control runaway development and boost rural prosperity, but the two former top state officials, as well as many farm economists and preservationists, said the bill would accomplish the opposite.
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Anchor to Grand Rapids neighborhood
Thursday, April 08, 2004 It’s Showtime, Again!
Grand Rapids city officials in 1989 slated the Wealthy Theatre for demolition, a plan that met immediate resistance from neighborhood residents who chose instead to refurbish the 78-year-old building. When the theater reopened in 1998 as a community arts center it increased pedestrian traffic, civic energy, and commerce. This is not an isolated success story. Similar examples of the power of historic preservation initiatives to restore urban character and lure people back to the core city abound across Grand Rapids and in other Michigan cities. According to a report published by the Michigan Historic Preservation Network, rehabilitation projects added $1.7 billion and 20,252 jobs to Michigan’s economy and returned almost $32 million in once-abandoned or dilapidated properties to local tax rolls since 1971.
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New use for old filtration plant
Thursday, April 01, 2004 A New Kind of Water Park
Hoping to make a crucial connection between creating new jobs and better protecting the planet's water supply, a Grand Rapids environmental engineer is working to transform a vacant, vandalized, but historic filtration plant into a cutting-edge water technology research laboratory. The facility, to be known as the Global Enterprise for Water Technology, would develop more effective ways to treat, distribute, conserve, and reuse water that would help meet a rapidly rising demand for safe and affordable supplies of the increasingly scarce natural resource.
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In the neighborhood
Friday, March 26, 2004 Big City Schools, Big City Challenges
While Michigan’s suburbs find it relatively easy to finance new schools and compete for students by building shining edifices at the edge of town, urban districts struggle to update their aging facilities and maintain enrollment. But an ambitious school construction program in Detroit and the restoration of the Coit School in Grand Rapids offer hope. Duplicating those feats in the rest of Grand Rapids and in other urban Michigan districts, however, is extraordinarily difficult, according to a new report on school construction trends by the Michigan Land Use Institute.
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Mural in Grand Rapids
Tuesday, March 16, 2004 Grand Rapids' Skid Row Renaissance
Innovative developers are transforming a formerly seedy part of Grand Rapids into an Avenue for the Arts by, among other things, rehabilitating four decrepit buildings there into attractive, low-rent studio, gallery, living, and retail business space for artists. The project would fit squarely into Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm's "Cool Cities" campaign, which hopes to establish state policies and tax incentives to encourage such projects. But the Legislature has rarely cooperated on affordable housing initiatives, so the developers are relying on less efficient ways to finance their drive to attract artists, part of the lifeblood of any cool city.
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Charlevoix High School
Friday, March 12, 2004 Outward Bound
Eventually, every community must deal with worn-out school buildings. The decision is often predictable: Americans generally prefer new over old, large over small, and lavish over simple. According to a major report just published by the Michigan Land Use Institute, state school construction policy in Michigan, what there is of it, heavily favors those preferences, thanks to several unintended consequences of Proposal A, as well as other factors, including the lack of state guidance for local school boards facing such decisions.
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Holland's walkable downtown
Thursday, February 05, 2004 People and Pavement:
A new approach for designing roads and other transportation systems that mesh with neighborhoods and the environment is gaining acceptance in Michigan, according to a report published this week by the Michigan Land Use Institute. In December Governor Jennifer M. Granholm issued an executive directive greatly increasing Michigan’s commitment to the new method, known in technical circles as “context-sensitive design.” Such high-level attention reflects both the increasing public resistance to new road construction and a more penetrating civic wisdom about the need to reduce costs and improve the design and quality of new highways, public transportation, and routes for bicycling and walking.
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Wrapping arms around Paris
Monday, February 02, 2004 How to Fall In Love With Cities
The conventional wisdom is that European cities are so attractive because they are so much older, with street plans locked in place before the arrival of the automobile. But something more is at work. Rather than accepting increasing auto traffic and creeping suburbanization as the inevitable march of “progress,” as many Americans do, Europeans defend the vitality of their hometowns. Historic neighborhoods are protected, transit systems improved, pedestrian zones expanded, green spaces preserved, bike lanes added, and development guidelines enacted to head off ugly outbreaks of sprawl.
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"Prime minister of cool" Richard Florida
Friday, December 19, 2003 Cities As Magnets For The Young
The presence of 1,400 of Michigan’s most prominent civic and elected leaders at last week’s Creating Cool conference offers dramatic evidence that Governor Jennifer Granholm’s “Cool Cities” initiative has grown from an attractive catch phrase into a powerful movement. It is pumping so much political energy into her young administration that meeting the needs of Michigan’s struggling cities tops her political priorities in a way not seen in the state since the 1970’s. “This is about making Michigan a magnet state”, Gov. Granholm said…
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Denver light rail
Wednesday, November 26, 2003 In Smart Growth’s Widening Wake, A Stream of Venom
Given the tide of worrisome events in the world it's understandable that America hasn't yet grasped one of the rare and singularly inspiring cultural trends of our time. Smart Growth has become a broadly popular and truly bipartisan national movement to strengthen economic development and make America a better place.Don't, however, include development interests and libertarians among those who’ve failed to note Smart Growth’s rising influence. The coast to coast work to help communities become cleaner, greener, safer, and more economically competitive is now seen by important sectors of the American right as one of the central threats to the conservative political base.
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Southeast Michigan works to curb sprawl.
Monday, November 10, 2003 Survey Finds Growing Support For Smart Growth Measures
A new statewide public opinion survey has found a sharp increase in support for a number of key methods for curbing sprawl and revitalizing cities in Michigan. The findings were made public at the recent Southeast Michigan Summit on Regional Redevelopment, and even indicated majority approval for ideas that have received no support from the state’s senior elected leaders, such as tax base sharing and limiting the growth of shopping centers. The survey was encouraging to the leaders at the conference, many of whom have embraced the principles of Smart Growth and are now planning ways to work together on redeveloping the entire region.
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Governor Jennifer Granholm
Tuesday, November 04, 2003 "Turfism is an Anachronism"
In a stirring appeal to civic leaders to end their “allegiance to turfism,” Governor Jennifer M. Granholm yesterday set out a remarkable 12-step agenda to begin reining in sprawl. Ms. Granholm said her administration would work with citizens and lawmakers to develop statewide land use goals, and the state would locate its new offices and buildings in cities and downtowns, and not in the countryside. She promised to speed the process of selling tax-reverted properties in order to encourage the development of new neighborhoods in the state’s cities. And she called on the Legislature to work with her in developing “commerce centers,” an idea recommended by members of a state land use panel that is designed to reinvigorate cites, downtowns, and older suburbs.
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Gov. Granholm, Mayor Logie
Friday, October 31, 2003 Granholm Chooses Grand Rapids to Underscore Sprawl-Fighting Priorities
Governor Jennifer Granholm will use an appearance early next week at a conference of west Michigan leaders to intensify her campaign for land use policy reform. The Democratic governor is expected to say which of the 160 actions recommended by a reform-minded council are her priorities. The local governments and civic organizations represented by the largely Republican audience make up the most effective and influential Smart Growth coalition in Michigan, and one of the outstanding such coalitions in the nation.
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Downtown Grand Rapids
Sunday, August 17, 2003 City Hall, Get Me Re-Write!
Eight months after adopting a nationally applauded master plan, Grand Rapids will soon take the next step towards creating a choice urban lifestyle: Rewriting its basic code of conduct for construction and land use. City leaders are facing tight budgets that could slow the project down, particularly since the highly innovative model code many area developers and leaders are most interested in — called SmartCode — requires more staff and financial resources to implement than a more traditional approach would.
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Street life in Ann Arbor
Sunday, May 11, 2003 It Ain’t Even Close
Reflecting a powerful civic consensus for state action on sprawl, hundreds of citizens from across Michigan attended public hearings late last month and in overwhelming numbers urged the Michigan Land Use Leadership Council to take bold steps to rein in runaway patterns of development. Collectively, their comments formed a challenge to the cautious tone the council has so far displayed in its own public deliberations. The comments also revealed how isolated sprawl’s proponents have become.
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Good homes in Traverse City
Tuesday, April 29, 2003 Smart Growth Can Deliver Affordable Housing
Smart Growth’s critics — particularly homebuilders — claim that any policy that discourages the ever-outward march of new subdivisions will make new houses more difficult to build and more expensive to buy. It's not true. Accumulating academic evidence shows that it is competition for homes in great places — in other words market forces not land use restrictions that are the primary factor in driving housing prices up. And those who insist that Smart Growth exacerbates the affordable housing shortage have no idea what they are talking about.
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Michiganders are the fattest people in America
Monday, March 31, 2003 Gaining Weight
Two reports by a farmland conservation group and the federal disease prevention agency provide clear evidence of sprawl’s unhealthy consequences. Lifestyles that are almost completely dependent on motors and wheels greatly reduce the opportunity and the inclination for people to do something as simple and healthy as walking. While a diet rich in fats and high in calories is what’s been putting on the pounds, the sprawling lifestyle’s inherent lack of physical activity makes sure they stay on Michigan thighs and stomachs. The result: We’re the heaviest people in America, and it’s costing Michigan billions of dollars in added health care expenses.
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Smart Growth for the next generation
Monday, March 24, 2003 Once In A Generation
Today the bipartisan Michigan Land Use Leadership Council meets for the first time. The council’s mission, as defined by Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm, is to inspire Michigan to curb sprawling patterns of development and craft a new economic future based on opportunity for people from all walks of life. I was fortunate enough to be appointed to this diverse 26-member panel, and view the council’s charge as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make Michigan a more economically competitive state, and a better place for generations. Given my own eight-year immersion in the hard work of slowing sprawl and building a Smart Growth future in Michigan I will do what I can to encourage the council to keep its vision high and work toward achieving a new framework for Smart Growth that establishes four significant improvements to help all of us decide how land is used in Michigan.
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Public transit in Ann Arbor
Thursday, February 20, 2003 Michigan Regions Play Transit Catch-Up
After decades of embracing conventional wisdom on transportation and allowing their transit systems to steadily erode, three of Michigan's most influential metropolitan regions --Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Ann Arbor -- have tossed aside the "conventional" and "wised up" to what was lost and can be regained. According to The Regional Ride, a just-published study by the Michigan Land Use Institute and United Cerebral Palsy, a remarkable reckoning with the new century's need for more economically effective, environmentally sensitive, and community-minded transportation services is taking shape statewide. The study found Michigan's metropolises taking significant steps to rebuild the high-quality, regional public transportation systems that existed 50 years ago.
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Fruit for Sale
Sunday, November 10, 2002 Grand Rapids Homebuilders Aim Torpedo At Farmland Protection
The 15-member board of the Grand Rapids homebuilders association has launched an aggressive campaign to defeat one of the largest farmland preservation programs ever proposed in the Midwest. In doing so, the homebuilders group is putting itself at odds with some of its own members and with nearly every other influential civic organization in the region, which support protecting farmland and Kent County’s $121 million agriculture industry.
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Downtown Grand Rapids
Thursday, October 03, 2002 Is It A Good Place?
Grand Rapids, MI — In perhaps the most visible evidence yet that curbing sprawl and investing in cities is considered a mainstream idea in Michigan, the state Chamber of Commerce and its local partners held a two-day conference here last month that focused on the link between thriving metropolitan centers and a secure economy.
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John Logie, mayor of Grand Rapids, Michigan
Thursday, April 25, 2002 A Mayor Speaks Out on Sprawl
Urban sprawl is alive and well in Grand Rapids, my hometown. The term refers to the insidious way that webs of suburbs, manufacturing plants, roads, and subdivisions are expanding in unplanned, ever-widening circles around our city.
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A pedestrian bridge over the Grand River
Monday, July 23, 2001 Take It to the River
The DeVos family, one of the wealthiest in Grand Rapids, has convinced some of the region’s prominent business and civic leaders to get awful excited about DeVos Place. That’s the new $200 million river side convention center that supporters say will help revitalize downtown Grand Rapids and beautify the Grand River.
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Grand Rapids, Michigan
Wednesday, July 11, 2001 Better by Design
Grand Rapids, already recognized as a leader in Michigan and the Midwest in planning to curb sprawl, is poised to take another important step toward protecting its quality of life and natural assets. The committee that is rewriting Grand Rapids’ outdated master plan is now considering new standards for development that are based on protecting natural resources.
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