NORTON SHORES, MI - A years-long effort to renovate?and expand St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church, a "world recognized work of architectural art," to the tune of $2.5 million has been completed.
The Norton Shores church known for its poured concrete facade?now has a more visible main entrance along with other improvements.
"We have a church here that's a world recognized work of architectural art?but there was no good door to get in," said the Rev. Charles Hall, of St. Francis.
In the centenary of her birth, Jacobs has been remembered as our Solon of cities: a shrewd theorist who revealed how cities work, why they thrive, and why they fail. Jacobs lived to the age of 89, long enough to see her renegade theories become conventional wisdom. No one questions anymore that lively neighborhoods require diversity of use and function, that more roads lead to more cars, that historic buildings should be preserved, that investment in public transportation reduces traffic and promotes neighborhood activity, that “flexible and gradual change” is almost always preferable to “cataclysmic,” broad-stroke redevelopment.
Urban life was Jacobs’s great subject. But her great theme was the fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble. A city offered the perfect laboratory in which to study democracy’s intricate, interconnected gears and ballistics. “When we deal with cities,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense.” When cities succeed, they represent the purest manifestation of democratic ideals: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When cities fail, they fail for the same reasons democracies fail: corruption, tyranny, homogenization, overspecialization, cultural drift and atrophy.
In a year when American democracy has courted despotism, Jacobs’s work offers a warning and a challenge. Her goal was never merely to enlighten urban planners. In her work she argued, with increasing urgency, that the distance between New York City and Higgins is not as great as it seems. It is not very great at all, and it is shrinking.
Back in the 1950s, local expressways in their planning stages were always known by their nicknames — the proposed Riverfront Route (Interstate 787), Northside Route (Interstate 90), and Crosstown Arterial (NY 85).
Some names have remained — like Alternate Route 7, the Thruway, and the Adirondack Northway but those are the exceptions rather then the rule. I think we should go back to calling the local roads the Riverfront Route, the Northside Route, and the Crosstown Arterial.
Electric vehicles are being driven about half the distance of conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, according to new a new paper from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC). That means policymakers may be underestimating the costs of going fully electric, according to the authors.
The study combined hourly electric meter readings with address-level EV registration records in California, and found the purchase of an EV raised a household's electricity consumption by just 2.9 kWh/day — indicating an average EV is driven about 5,300 miles annually. According to EPIC, that's less than half of the U.S. fleet average.
There are several possible reasons EVs are driven less. "Perhaps most pessimistic for electrification would be if EVs are viewed by drivers as complements to gasoline cars, as opposed to substitutes," David Rapson, an associate professor in the University of California Davis economics department and a co-author of the paper, said in an email.
For years, automakers stalled progress on climate change and cleaning up our air. Consumers interested in electric vehicles often struggle to find them on dealer lots, in part because manufacturers don’t make or distribute enough of them.
Automakers spend a tiny fraction of their ad budgets on their plug-in products. When Donald Trump came into office, Toyota, GM, and other major automakers like Stellantis (formerly Fiat Chrysler) asked his administration to weaken Obama-era greenhouse gas and fuel economy standards for cars — which had been our government’s most ambitious program to reduce planet-warming emissions. Until recently, they also supported the Trump administration’s attack on California’s authority to protect its residents from vehicle pollution, which was the foundation of 14 other states’ authority to do the same.