End of the Summer.

We've had a grueling couple months of examining and building budgets, debating domestic partner benefits, annexation policy and billboards.

I'm sitting at my desk on a Friday afternoon trying to catch up with emails and projects and things to do. The building is empty, the last day of the four-day work week pilot project.

The summer is ending.

House of Pizza is open again after their much dreaded (at least in Central) annual summer vacation. We all breathed a collective sigh of relief and marched up the street to eat pizza and drink beer.

My kids started school this week. The baby started his first day of kindergarten at Crockett Elementary, the same school that my brothers and I grew up in. The baby's class is populated with a whole slew of kids whose parents went to school with me and my brothers. I walk with the boys, when they will let me, down the same path that I walked to school on growing up.

I guess I should be reporting to you all the latest goings on at the city or the new policy question before us, but mostly I just wanted you to know that I love the neighborhood I live in, the very same neighborhood that I grew up in. I love walking up to House of Pizza on a Thursday night in August. I love summer nights in Newman Park. I love walking my boys to school, waving to my parents as we begin our walk. I love chatting with the parents in the school yard, catching up after the summer, so many of us raised and rooted in this neighborhood. I love walking home towards the Franklin Mountain, daydreaming about the day and thinking about everything that I need to do. My love for this city grew on Louisville Street and that is where my heart still remains. The rhythm of this neighborhood is who I am.

Housing, Transportation, Affordability and Greenhouse Gases

I live in Manhattan Heights. It takes me 10 minutes by car to get to work Downtown. Actually it takes me 5 to 10 minutes to get most anywhere I need to go in a day: grocery store, good restaurants, gas station. My kids can walk to school. We can walk to two parks, the library, the coffee shop in the library, the swimming pool, the House of Pizza, Papaburger and Food Q in five minutes. The bus runs down Piedras and Alabama, just two blocks from my house in either direction.

According to the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), this means I live in a location efficient neighborhood.

While the concept of energy efficiency is a familiar term, locations can be efficient too. Compact neighborhoods with walkable streets, access to transit, and a wide variety of stores and services have high location efficiency. They require less time, money, and greenhouse gas emissions for residents to meet their everyday travel requirements.

Based on this idea, CNT developed the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index. which takes into account not just the cost of housing, but also its location efficiency, by measuring the transportation costs associated with place. Some places cost more to live in not because of the costs of housing but because of the costs of transportation associated with living in that place. Location inefficient places require you to spend more time in your car and more money on gas and car travel.

The City recently contracted with CNT to analyze how affordable El Paso is when you take into account housing costs and transportation costs as a percentage of income. You'll be suprised at the results which can be found at http://www.htaindex.cnt.org/. There are also maps that show the greenhouse gas emmissions associated with car travel in El Paso.

Let me know what you think.