Online Webinar

The Census Bureau has valuable data that are helpful for community planning, analyzing, reporting, grant-writing, etc. In this Webinar, you will learn about popular Census Bureau surveys and the type of information you can access from them. You will receive a brief tour of the Census Bureau’s website and live demonstrations of popular data retrieval tools to help you find data quickly and build a customized data query. Topics include the various geographical levels of how data can be accessed, where and how to find data regarding your community such as population, demographic makeup, economic, and housing, and the various data view/download options, to include data tables, Excel spreadsheets, and mapping features.

Trails are part of a resilient transportation infrastructure system and can be planned and designed to be resilient and sustainable, as well as play a role in emergency planning and response. Trails of all kinds are places for recreation, exercise, and active transportation. They are also a crucial tool for making communities more resilient in the face of climate change and other emergencies. Multi-use trails can help reduce carbon emissions by shifting more trips to walking, biking, and rolling. Urban, suburban, and rural trail corridors present opportunities for managing stormwater, improving water quality, providing wildlife habitat, and inhibiting the spread of fires, among other benefits. However, trails can also be particularly vulnerable to climate impacts. This session will examine the ways in which planners can work towards making trail infrastructure more resilient to environmental shocks and stresses as well as towards allowing trails to strengthen the resilience of the surrounding community. Presenters from Trust for Public Land and Toole Design Group will provide information and guidance in support of these goals, based on recent programs and experience.

In water-scarce regions, the lack of availability of water supply often constrains the ability of communities to approve new residential and commercial development. A building moratorium has sometimes been declared in California communities and elsewhere. The City of Phoenix is now undergoing an evaluation of how new development can proceed in the face of Colorado River Basin shortages. But a solution is at hand.

This webinar will focus on the ways in which the affordable housing landscape has changed in New Jersey post pandemic. We will look at tax credit, development, lending and municipal roles and how those roles have changed. What are the challanges? What has improved? There have been significant changes in construction costs, interest rates, and municipal affordable housing status in the past few years, so it will be helpful to get the varying perspectives on what different practitioners are seeing.

This event, hosted by the NJTOD.org, Downtown New Jersey, and NJ TRANSIT’s Transit Friendly Planning (TFP) program, will bring together a panel of experts from public, private, and non-profit entities to discuss their experiences with available financing tools and how they are used in transit-oriented development.

How can community leaders continue to engage stakeholders and other members of the public in important local decisions when staying safe means staying home? The MSU National Charrette Institute and the Form-Based Codes Institute at Smart Growth America are partnering to deliver a series of webinars to provide local leaders, developers and advocates with tools and examples for staying in touch, sharing ideas, and getting interactive feedback to keep critical decisions moving forward. Many of these techniques, while essential in this time of separation, have the potential to engage new, hard-to-reach segments of the community, and will be useful, even beyond this current crisis.