We can do more to make Philadelphia a leader in environmental issues, making our city one of the greenest and cleanest.

We can expand upon greening neighborhoods with more trees and community gardens and green buildings. This also makes good economic sense. At LISC we sponsored a successful Green Building Conference in November 2006 in partnership with the Energy Coordinating Agency, Delaware Valley Green Building Council, Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission and many other partners.

We need to use our advantage of dense row houses, which are very energy efficient already. With additional investment in energy efficiency we will cut down on our energy costs and save homeowners and businesses tremendous amounts of money that will stay in our economy rather than going overseas. Philadelphia has a great architecture, design and planning community that should be fully embraced by City government. Our zoning codes are also outmoded and need to be updated to make them fairer across the board, and the design community can help to make that happen.

By cleaning up and reusing former environmentally challenged (Brownfields) sites we can also build our economy and eliminate blight. I have already done this when I served as the City’s first Brownfields Coordinator and was able to attract over $2.5 million in State and Federal funding to leverage private investment in Philadelphia.