Houston is so-so on sustainability

SustainLane, a web resource for making choices about personal health, home, and city sustainability, has published this year's City Rankings, which measure the quality-of-life and economic factors of the U.S.'s fifty largest cities. There are fifteen categories ranging from air quality to housing affordability, and four possible rankings in each category: sustainability leader, moving to sustainability, mixed sustainability progress, sustainability at risk, and the melancholy sustainability laggard.

Surprisingly, Houston ranked best on metro transit, city innovation, city commuting, and housing affordability (they must have been outer-loop, but not too far out to make the commute painful), and with no surprise, worst on planning/land use, local food/agriculture, natural disaster risk, and metro congestion. In the remaining categories of air quality, tap water quality, solid waste diversion, energy/climate change policy, green economy, knowledge base, and LEED buildings, Houston scored with mediocrity.

Complete methodology is available, explaining from where the data was pulled, along with explanations for the categories (like the intuitive "knowledgebase," which actually relates to "research on whether cities have a sustainability plan"). Karl Pepple, the City of Houston's Director of Environmental Programming, was SustainLane's local source for primary research.

Overall, Houston sits thirty-ninth out of fifty, while Portland, Oregon ranked first in sustainability, and Columbus, Ohio bottomed out the list.

While surveys and rankings can often be off target or just plain unreliable, we like this one because it also offers tips on living a healthy lifestyle individually and for the community.

Photo: Flickr user slight clutter