Biography of Scott Berstein, President of the Center for Neighborhood Technology

Scott Bernstein is President of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, an urban sustainability innovations laboratory which develops resources and systems to promote healthy, sustainable communities by helping local leaders understand and use their hidden assets; and publisher (1978-1998) of The Neighborhood Works, winner of the Peter Lisagor Award for Public Service Journalism. He studied engineering and political science at Northwestern University and served on the research staff at its Center for Urban Affairs. He taught at UCLA, was on the Humphrey School Policy Program Board at the University of Minnesota and was a founding Board member at the Brookings Institution Urban & Metropolitan Center.

President Clinton appointed him to the President’s Council for Sustainable Development, where he co-chaired its task forces on Metropolitan Sustainable Communities and on Cross-Cutting Climate Issues with Dr. James Baker of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration; and to other Federal advisory panels on global warming, development strategy, and science policy. His work has provided leading approaches to urban economic development, resource efficiency, and transportation; currently, CNT is analyzing Chicago’s carbon footprint for the Chicago Climate Task Force of which he is a member; partnering with the Clinton Foundation, ICLEI and Microsoft to provide advanced climate change planning software for the world’s forty largest cities, and has co-founded the Presidential Climate Action Plan, which has written a "climate change playbook" for the first 100 and 1000 days of the next Administration, to be release in late 2007. This assignment also included produced a study demonstrating that reducing travel is as important as, and a necessary complement to achieving cleaner transportation technology.

CNT has spent the last twenty-nine years analyzing the relationships between regionally scaled economic and political systems, and the status of communities within these regions. Demonstration work in the 1980’s in the fields of energy efficiency, pollution prevention, stormwater management, recycling and housing abandonment prevention helped fuel a generation of community development institutions and learning (see Land Reform Chicago Style at http://www.ceosforcities.org/research/2002/land_reform/ch2.html#i ).

He co-founded the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership in 1990, a national coalition which shifted federal policy toward greater local control, and currently serves as Chairman. The resulting ISTEA legislation has been reauthorized twice, most recently in 2005. Since 1991, the portion of public dollars spent on enhancing existing systems jumped from 55 to 80 percent, mass transportation investments rose to record levels, and a firm basis was laid for promoting urban and suburban reinvestment over decentralization and sprawl.

He helped organize and lead the world’s first study of location efficiency in metropolitan areas, along with MacArthur Fellow Dr. David Goldstein of NRDC, Hank Dittmar of the Princes Foundation for the Built Environment-UK, Dr. John Holtzclaw of the Sierra Club, and Dr. Peter Haas of CNT. This is the first study to provide firm empirical proof of the relationship between accessibility and convenience and travel demand on a fine-grained geographic information basis. It showed that increases in accessibility and convenience, a proxy for urbanism, result in significant and permanent reductions in travel demand. This work was peer-reviewed and published in a supplemental study for the National Academy of Sciences that provided the nation’s first web-based calculator for estimating personal and community-level greenhouse gas emissions from different travel choices.

He co-founded the Center for Transit Oriented Development, a partnership with Reconnecting America and Strategic Economics, whose mission is to promote TOD as a preferred development form, managing it to maximize new economic value creation, and implementing TOD in ways that help communities and investors capture this value systematically. CTOD created the nation’s first National TOD Database, covering all 4,000 existing and developing TOD sites in the US; and a new housing & transportation affordability index, to help better disclose the economic value of good transportation access. These resources provide new performance benchmarks for TOD. He led the development of the Location Efficient Mortgage® , a product that increases housing affordability by recognizing the value of convenient living, which is available in dozens of metropolitan areas, and the new Housing + Transportation Affordability Indexsm, to help working families recognize the full value of reducing transportation expenditures. This latter index was used to show that working families now typically pay more for transportation than for housing, published by the Center for Housing Policy of the National Housing Conference in A Heavy Load: The Combined Housing and Transportation Burdens of Working Families. A new web site will be available later this Fall that provides this index, maps and data base access for 52 metropolitan areas.With CTOD, he co-authored The New Transit Town: Best Practices in Transit-Oriented Development (Island Press 2005) and Street Smart: Streetcars &Cities in the 21st Century, one of this year’s Congress for a New Urbanism Charter Award winners (May 2007).

Collectively, these findings are that good places are a "convenient and affordable" remedy to "an inconvenient truth."

With Julia Parzen, he organized an Urban Sustainability Learning Group to identify principles for collective efficacy and comprehensive regional performance This work helped specify the Metropolitan Initiative, supported by foundations and inspired by the PCSD to re-craft the relationship between the federal government and local regions. In 1997-98, the program engaged 1,000 civic leaders in twelve urban regions to address the possibilities and identified new strategies for building effective partnerships to take advantage of both policy changes and market rules; findings are posted at www.cnt.org/mi . This program was succeeded by the Partnership for Regional Livability, www.pfrl.org. Current initiatives include (a) the Bay Area Family of Funds, a $200 Million commitment by social investors to enable community-scale investments in mixed income, mixed use developments in communities in that metropolitan area that exhibit persistent poverty; resulting investments are meeting a "triple bottom line" set of criteria around economic, environmental and social equity outcomes, sponsored by the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities; (b) the Mixed Income Communities Initiative of Metropolitan Atlanta, intended to foster new approaches to housing affordability through a combination of new commitments to preventing exclusion, and new approaches to lowering the cost of housing through new housing products, better technology, better reuse of existing housing and infrastructure stock and new methods of capturing the value of these economies to the benefits of residents and communities and investors; and (c) Clean Air Counts, a broad Chicago-based scorekeeping coalition devoted to improved regional air quality.

With John Norquist, former Mayor of Milwaukee, and President of the Congress for a New Urbanism, he is currently leading an effort to replace aging elevated highways with surface boulevards and mass transportation. See www.cnu.org . He’s also leading efforts to examine innovative transportation as a key to revitalization in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, Columbus Ohio, Seattle Washington, Buffalo New York, and many other cities. Recently, with Joel Rogers of the University of Wisconsin, he has helped develop new learning networks of progressive mayors and governor’s committed to positive social change through a "high wage, low waste" economy.

Bernstein and CNT earned awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects; Renew America; the Enterprise Foundation; the Secretary of Energy; the League of Women Voters; American Institute of Architects; USEPA; Midwest Energy Efficiency Association, the Sustainable Buildings Industry Council, and Mayor Daley of Chicago, among others. In 2006 CNTs office received the coveted "Platinum" rating from the US Green Building Council, and CNT’s Energy Smart Pricing Plan received the Chicago Sun Times Innovation Award. Scott is 56, resides in Evanston Illinois & can be reached at scott@cnt.org. See www.cnt.org.

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