If there's a positive from the recession, it's been the fact that U.S. households are lowering their debts and getting their finances back in order. What hasn't changed is that the majority of a family's income still goes to covering housing costs, and the affordability of where you live doesn't always equal the amount you pay in rent or on your mortgage -- it's often times higher, meaning the cost of housing is even more of a majority.

In recent years a little noticed shift has been transforming suburbia: the home of the middle class has become the home of the working poor. As a result, roadways that were built for the car are now used by a growing population that can't afford to drive. The consequences can be deadly. Blueprint America on Need to Know from suburban Atlanta where getting to the other side of the road is nothing to take for granted.

Remember your old friend, The Bill? That lovable Schoolhouse Rocks' character? Well... He's gone missing. And the ransom: $6.5 billion... Or he gets it. Maybe that's a little extreme. But, the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit government watchdog, reported this week that there was "$6.5 billion worth of unspent earmarks from the most recent transportation funding bill" passed in 2005. The group is calling the unspent money, "Disappearmarks."

Many commercial real estate loans across the country will mature soon, and community banks will feel the strain if property owners can’t pay. Georgia Tech Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones, author of Retrofitting Suburbia, explains the benefits of turning properties in the red, green.

Alison Stewart sits down with Elizabeth Warren, attorney, Harvard Law professor and chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, in a Blueprint America special report about the potential of a national commercial real estate foreclosure crisis.

An old factory town in Iowa eyes 'green' future, improved livability -- making good on the President's stimulus plan one year later.

KCET public television in Southern California -- as a part of Blueprint America -- in a two part report following the one-year mark of President Obama's stimulus plan on the question of high-speed rail and the potential of green jobs as the California state budget verges on bankruptcy.

The transportation bill -- the massive legislation authorizing and funding the country’s roads and mass-transit infrastructure (from highways to bus lanes to railways to bike lanes) -- expires every six years. That, however, does not mean a new bill is passed every six-years. It’s Washington, D.C., after all. Come along with Blueprint America correspondent Miles O'Brien as he talks to people on Capitol Hill about how the transportation bill becomes a law.

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) announced on Wednesday the winning projects to be funded under their Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant program, which was created to oversee the dispersal of $1.5 billion included in the stimulus plan a year ago. In other words, a bureaucracy within a bureaucracy. While the DOT's function is to oversee the flow of transportation dollars from Washington, the TIGER program's function is to do it better (as it relates to stimulus funding and as it relates to finally using an acronym that is also Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's nickname).