The antidote to urban sprawl, says Greenbelt Alliance, is taller buildings and higher population densities within established urban core areas.

Greenbelt Alliance's recently published Smart Infill: A practical guide to creating vibrant places throughout the Bay Area  was written to inform decision makers about the benefits of these policies, and cite examples where they have been successfully employed. One of them, says Daisy Pistey-Lyhne, is the Town of Windsor.

 

Sonoma County has been a leader in adopting community separators or Urban Growth Boundaries for its cities. Those are a key first step in redirecting growth away from sprawl patterns back into urban infill.

 

 

For more information about the Sonoma County branch of Greenbelt Alliance, click here .

Greenbelt Alliance also regularly hosts hikes throughout the BayArea. You'll find a list of upcoming events here.

 

 

Playing soccer isn't a well-traveled path out of homelessness. But for one formerly troubled Santa Rosa man, it's working.

Cornelius Bracy, a formerly homeless  soccer player from Sonoma County, will be  part of the American team at the Homeless World Cup that takes place in Australia next month. The Homeless World Cup began in 2003 as a "catalyst for lasting change through the development of street soccer worldwide in a way that creates maximum social impact for the players involved--the socially excluded, homeless people and people living in poverty."

 

Julius Ujeh, a soccer coach from Nigeria, began a Street Soccer league for homeless young adults in Sonoma County. The program, originally started in Australia, has given young adults a purpose that teaches discipline and self-motivation. 

Street soccer is a mini-version of the traditional game of soccer, which can be played on any hard, flat rectangular surface, roughly the size of a tennis court. The new "traveling field" (shown below) gives the U.S. team an attractive, safe surface on which to play, and a sense of identity for the players.

Four players compete on each side (one of them is a goalie) and games last for 14 minutes each. While games are short, they are very fast-paced. The name of the event was coined in 2003 during the first Homeless World Cup.

 

Proposition 2, the ballot measure to ban restrictive cages for calves, pigs and chickens in California may have ripple effects that reach well beyond the state's farms.

You can read the state's impartial summary and analysis of Proposition 2 here.

 

Arnie Riebli, managing owner of Sonoma County's Sunrise Farms, says passage of Proposition 2 would put him out of business (photo courtesy of the Sonoma Index-Tribune).  Supporters of Prop 2 like the Humane Society of the US and the Sierra Club say it would end crueltyto farm animals and increase health safety.

 

To see a list of opposition to Prop 2, click here.

 

 

 

 

 

Budget cuts and increased enrollment are driving Sonoma State University to impose a limit on how many courses students can take next semester.

 

For many on the SSU campus, the first word of the new cap on academic units for the Spring Semester came in the form of a front page article on the Star, the weekly campus newspaper, on Tuesday. That angered many faculty members, who saw it as another instance of the university administration imposing its will and decisions, without appropriate consultation or notice, as Professor Andy Merrifield explains.

However,  the University Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Eduaro Ochoa (right), says this was an emergency action, and there simply wasn't time to include those collaborative steps.

 

 

Three generations later, a poisonous chemical used by American armed forces in Viet Nam is still wreaking havoc on the native population.

The effects of the U.S. military's use of Agent Orange in Viet Name are rippling down through the generations of the population there, Merle Ratner says, and so far there is no end in sight.

 

 

      To educate the community on the impact of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, the 4th annual Justice for Vietnam Agent Orange Victims will stop in Santa Rosa at the Glaser Center (see map)  on October 29^th 7  pm.   Tran Thi Hoan (right) and Dang Hong Nhut (below), both victims of Agent Orange, will be speaking at the event. To see a map of the Glaser Center location, click here .