The official flyer for the City of Dallas Greening project

The city of Dallas is using stimulus funds to build and retrofit its infrastructure. Part of the plan is to recruit out of work people in low income areas to get trained and paid to retrofit homes in their communities.  It's a way to meet Obama's 3 criteria of putting people back to work, training them, rebuilding infrastructure, and gearing up for green jobs.
We are competing with Houston.  They just passed us up by up grading their public transport, but we are finishing up a new train line ourselves. What's it called? The Green Line, of course.

Rick

Re: The official flyer for the City of Dallas Greening project

Brilliant - go for it Rick.

Re: The official flyer for the City of Dallas Greening project

I didn't know you left San Antonio!

I've never been to Dallas. I've been to San Antonio, which was really cool, a little town near San Antonio called Kosciuska, which was also really cool, and the Houston airport a few times, which was pleasant. I hear Austin's pretty nice; I'd like to go there.

Chicago's been on a big green campaign as well. Apparently they've been pretty successful at it, relatively speaking.

Re: The official flyer for the City of Dallas Greening project

The city is also developing the largest, usable, urban (in city limits), park in the world. “It's much larger than Central Park,” everyone's saying.  The people in city hall right now loosing thier minds with the stimulus money. Texas wasn't hit that hard by the market crash, so all the development money is adding to everything, and rebuilding everything, rather than just keeping things the same. 
This project that I'm appart of is actually something the director of the environmental office dreamed up a couple of years ago, but there wasn't any money for it.
So, now everyone pulling out these dream projects and doing them. They're also building up the train system to connect downtown with the suburbs and towns an hour away. 

And yes, Austin is where hippies go to die and where cowboys and punx drink Schinner Bock together.  If there's one town here to see, it's probably Austin.  The only problem with Austin is becoming more and more like Southern California.  As SXSW got bigger and bigger and people from Cali, and elsewhere saw how cheap it was to live in Texas, and how interesting Austin was, they moved there.
When I was 20, in downtown Austin I would only have to buy one beer, and strangers would just buy me more beer. Then if I got too drunk, someone would take me to thier homes and I'd pass out on the couch.
Now, that doesn't happen as much. Service has gotten bad in restaraunts, etc…
I've attached a movie made by a local film maker, and all the people in the film are real, local people from Austin. It really used to be like that.

Anyway, now I'm in Denton, north of Dallas. Denton is a small college town that we call the “Little Austin,” because it has a lot of live music places and people from all over come to play here.

As far as cities go, Dallas isn't close to number one in being green or progressive, but it's far passed Houston, which is like any other generic, strip mall city in America.  

Re: The official flyer for the City of Dallas Greening project

Rick: The city is also developing the largest, usable, urban (in city limits), park in the world. “It's much larger than Central Park,” everyone's saying.


I think that's a great idea. Parks are really important. I think beauty in our cities is something that got left behind in the modern era.

I recently read an article that talked about criticisms of really good architecture for museums and such, people who thought the money could be spent elsewhere. The Dallas performing arts center was mentioned. I think projects like that are really important, though, and undervalued. Beauty in architecture is very important in cityscapes, as are parks.

Yeah, I saw that movie when it came out. I liked it. Have you ever been to Austin City Limits? It's now the longest running music-television series in U.S. history.