The top sustainable U.S. cities

What are the most sustainable cities in the US? One organization, SustainLane keeps track, via their annual US City Rankings. It’s not a measure of how green a city is, it’s a measure of how sustainable its public health, local economy and quality of life is. The criteria:

Public health – air and drinking water quality, walkability;
Keeping money in the local economy – renewable energy and alternative fuels, transit, walkability, green building and local food production;
Quality of life – walkability, affordable housing, number of parks, susceptibility to energy price surges, vulnerability to natural disasters**

The top 15 out of the 50 most populous cities:

1. Portland, OR
2. San Francisco
3. Seattle
4. Philadelphia
5. Chicago
6. Oakland, Calif.
7. New York
8. Boston
9. Denver
10. Minneapolis
11. Baltimore
12. Washington
13. Sacramento, Calif.
14. Austin, Texas
15. Honolulu

For a more extensive review, go here.

**If anyone’s skeptical as to why natural disasters are part of the criteria, you may not be after watching An Inconvenient Truth.

Tomorrow: How to get your city ranked higher.

About The Author

neilkt