Georgia lost nearly 17 percent of its construction jobs between January 2009 and last January, according to a data published yesterday by the Associated General Contractors of America. That translates to more than 30,000 people who’ve lost their jobs. At the risk of an out-of-work carpenter going after me with a nail gun, here’s my question: [...]

Fresh off the last year’s raves its work on Manhattan’s High Line linear park on an abandoned elevated railroad, New York’s James Corner Field Operations has been hired to design Atlanta’s Beltline. Beltline officials announced today that James Corner will join with the Atlanta office of Perkins + Will, which happens to employ Beltline visionary Ryan [...]

The work of modernist architect Paul Rudolph, who designed Emory’s Cannon Chapel, is disappearing quickly, Treehugger reports. I didn’t realize that Rudolph — one of the most prominent modernists of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s — was known for his groundbreaking “green” work. But Treehugger offers numerous examples of his use of daylighting, shading and natural [...]

Column by U.S. Rep. John Lewis: Because of its investment in transportation, Georgia was a leader in our region 20 years ago, but today it has fallen behind because it has not advanced a comprehensive statewide and regional transportation plan. Lately, Georgia has not demonstrated that it understands transportation’s potential to create jobs, heighten commercial advantages [...]

Savannah furniture maker Structured Green gets a nice write-up in Treehugger, the popular environmental webzine. Structured Green, based in Savannah, Georgia, is designing and building a variety of home furnishings from a spectrum of low-impact materials such as bamboo, certified sustainable lumber, and woods salvaged from barns and riverbeds. It’s all held together with water-based glues [...]

Gov. Perdue’s proposed $300 million bond plan for transportation would do little to help metro commuters and even less to give Atlantans alternatives to the automobile. According to this morning’s Atlanta Business Chronicle article breaking down, the plan’s mainly about moving freight through Georgia: … the most expensive project on the governor’s list would spend $121 million [...]

Here’s a provocative argument that draws a link between the issue of climate change and sprawling metro areas like Atlanta. In an interview with Grist, prominent environmental editor Alex Steffen argues that environmental groups are largely ignoring a key battle line in the debate over climate change. Cities sit on one side of that divide and [...]

In a larger piece on taxes, the AJC’s Jay Bookman, offers convincing real-world evidence that Portland’s approach to transit and growth is working better than Atlanta’s: Wendell Cox, a highway advocate and a favorite transportation consultant for Georgia conservatives, argued in the Atlanta Constitution back in 1999 that the Georgia model would prevail. In fact, [...]

Georgia’s failure to obtain anything but crumbs out of $8 billion in high-speed rail grants gives an economic development edge to North Carolina, a state to which we’re often compared. The Tar Heel state grabbed a $545 million portion of the pie, which could eventually lead to high-speed service that links up to Washington, D.C., and [...]

It’s kind of hard to be surprised at a report this evening that the Obama administration has decided to grant only a tiny fraction of $8 billion in high-speed rail stimulus money to Georgia. Georgia legislators have, after all, failed to use previous federal grants for commuter rail and before that for a multimodal station in [...]