Suburban sprawl is about as anti-sustainable as you can get. Residents who must drive anywhere to do anything, whether it's grabbing a cup of coffee or picking up a prescription, have an over-sized carbon footprint that also reduces real estate value.

That's the theme of a new report and video from the Congress for the New Urbanism. Reducing the average vehicle miles traveled per person by just one mile per day would save $29 billion annually, according to a report. "That not a one time stimulus, that's a stimulus every year," said Carol Coletta, the CEO of CEOs for Cities.

Housing prices remain more stable throughout the metro area if they have an urban core, said Coletta, citing data from "Driven to the Brink" a joint CEOs for Cities/CNU study. The study gave an example of the suburb of Buffalo Grove, Illinois, where residents pay up to 28 percent of their income on transportation alone.

Coletta will speak at CNU's 17th annual conference in June 10-14 in Denver.

This year's American Recovery and Act heavily invests in mass transit and transportation, and is indicative of the current shift towards smart urban planning. As architect Scott Sarver points out in Forbes, this thinking isn't new at all -- it's a return to the pre-World War II philosophy of how cities and towns were designed. Governments federal and local are taking the first steps toward undoing the "Levittownization" of the suburbs and restoring sustainability to urban planning.

CNU recently held a contest for a video about the impact of suburban sprawl. The winning video, "Built to Last" mocks sprawl as the greatest threat to humanity. That may be an overreach, but the negative impact on health and economic development is not.