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Monday Mailing

Year 24 • Issue 13 11 December 2017 1.

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These 6 Cities Are Smarter Than Portland About Housing Central Oregon Zoning Pits Mule Deer Against Churches East Oregon Commissioners to Weigh in on Forest Plan in D.C. Christmas Tree Shortage Causes Higher Prices This Year How to Build A City That Doesn’t Flood? Turn It Into A Sponge America’s Leading Art Hubs Oregon Tourism Information System 2018 Training Sessions Revving Up Rural Public Transit Perfection or Success? Which One Will You Choose?

'Montréal Urban Ecology Centre Releases New Placemaking Tool Why Manning Up Is the Worst Thing to Do

1. These 6 Cities Are Smarter Than Portland About Housing In Portland, housing costs are like the weather: Everybody complains, but nobody does anything about it.

Nearly a year ago, Mayor Ted Wheeler and City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly entered City Hall on platforms promising to tackle Portland's affordable housing shortage. Soon, the City Council will wade into its latest plan.

It looks like treating a heart attack with a Band-Aid. The program, called the "residential infill project," will receive public hearings next year. Wheeler wants to allow duplexes and granny flats in city neighborhoods set aside for single-family homes. His plan has infuriated neighborhood associations and historic preservationists.

Quote of the Week: “Your body will honor you with wellness if you honor it with awareness.” ~Anonymous Oregon Fast Fact: A coin toss decided the name of Portland in 1845.

The losing name was Boston.

Even if successful, the infill project would barely address Portland's housing shortfall. The city Planning Bureau projects the program would add 4,700 duplexes and triplexes by 2035.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Central Oregon Zoning Pits Mule Deer Against Churches Getting around Tillamook County was at least a little easier Thursday as floodwaters receded, allowing for the reopening of U.S. 101, county officials said.

The highway remains closed, however, farther north at the small town of Wheeler and will remain so through the weekend, officials said Thursday afternoon.

And other detours that usually allow residents and visitors to get around flood zones -- such as the Miami Foley Road at Garibaldi, and Oregon 53 in the Coast Range connecting motorists to U.S. 26 -- remain closed.

To access the full story, click here.

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3. East Oregon Commissioners to Weigh in on Forest Plan in D.C. Eastern Oregon county commissioners will make their voice heard Dec. 12 – 14 when Pacific Northwest Regional Forest Jim Peña presents the Blue Mountains Forest Plan Revision in Washington, D.C. The Blue Mountains Forest Plan has been under revision since 2003 and is a guiding document for the Malheur, Umatilla and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests. Susan Roberts, chairman of the Eastern Oregon Counties Association, said a draft of the plan released in June had significant changes in grazing requirements from a draft released in January.

“We were concerned that those changes would have an economic impact on our local communities,” Roberts said.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Christmas Tree Shortage Causes Higher Prices This Year The Christmas tree industry has experienced both feast and famine recently and depending on whether you are the grower or the consumer that could be either a good thing or not.

Christmas tree prices are rising this year due to a shortage of trees nationwide. This year the large farms sold out before the season began and will benefit from the higher prices because of the shortage, but the consumer pays the price. Artificial trees are another option and are a factor in the decrease in the number of Christmas tree growers.

Growers have years invested before they can reap their harvest. It takes an average of seven years to grow a Douglas-fir, one of the most popular Christmas trees on the market. Another popular tree, the Nobel fir, takes nine years to reach maturity and industry officials say it's likely there will be a seedling shortage until 2019. This means that there will be fewer Nobel trees until the year 2028.

To access the full story, click here.

5. How to Build A City That Doesn’t Flood? Turn It Into A Sponge Urban floods make the news with alarming regularity. Just in the past few months, Hurricane Harvey submerged Houston, and the seasonal monsoon crippled cities in South Asia. Dramatic floods from increasingly severe storms come with a steep cost, both human and financial, and the problem will only get worse with climate change. One of the biggest culprits for the deadly toll these floods wreak? Urbanization.

As cities develop, miles of impervious pavement are laid over forest or wetlands, displacing the natural flood management systems like creeks, underground streams, or bogs. In a completely uninhabited landscape, rainfall integrates into the natural water cycle by four different ways: it either soaks all the way to the ground and becomes groundwater; runs down valleys into bodies of water and finds its way to the sea; is taken up by plants; or just evaporates. In urban or suburban sprawls with paved roads, highways, and parking lots, water has nowhere to go, so every heavy rain can turn into a flood.

To access the full story, click here.

6. America’s Leading Art Hubs It’s Art Basel Miami Beach on Wednesday, when the world’s leading artists, galleries, and collectors head to the main art fair and the many satellite fairs scattered across the Miami region. It’s impressive Page 2 of 5

how much contemporary art can be amassed in one place. Walking through the fairs, you can see art from across the nation and the world.

This prompts the question: Where are America’s leading art centers and scenes—the places where working artists actually work and produce art?

To identify them, I used data organized by the economic data and modeling firm, Emsi, to measure the concentration of artists in America’s 100 largest metros. The data, which span 2011 to 2016, cover both employed and self-employed fine artists (including painters, sculptors, and illustrators), craft artists, multimedia artists and animators, and other artists and related workers. In 2016, there were more than 200,000 artists working in these large metro areas, a 12 percent increase since 2011 To access the full story, click here.

7. Oregon Tourism Information System 2018 Training Sessions The Oregon Tourism Information System, or OTIS, is a collaborative platform used for sharing and maintaining Oregon’s tourism assets.

OTIS is the central hub for maintaining points of interest like attractions, trails, parks, events and deals. OTIS is powered by open-source software and allows tourism partners to push their updates to the database and pull them into their website leveraging the OTIS API (free). Currently, OTIS is only open to local DMOs, regional DMOs and certain statewide trade groups like the Oregon Restaurant & Lodging Association and the Oregon Wine Board.

Interested in learning more? Send your questions to OTIS@TravelOregon.com or attend training session.

Starting in 2018, training sessions will be held the first Wednesday of the month from 10 – 11 a.m.* For more information, click here.

8. Revving Up Rural Public Transit When the sun rises over Plainview, Nebraska, Arnold Oltjenbruns is already up and ready for work.

Beginning at 7:30 A.M., he picks up the kids that he drives to school. “I like hauling the kids the best,” he says. “As soon as they get in the van they’re talking away, and telling me what’s going on.”

Oltjenbruns drives Plainview’s “Handivan”—a small, accessible van that provides public transit for Plainview’s 1,200 residents. Whether he’s taking people to school, medical appointments, stores, (or to a nursing home in a neighboring town so that one gentleman could visit his girlfriend), Oltjenbruns and the Handivan can be the difference between isolation and strong social ties in the small northeastern Nebraska city.

Oltjenbruns, a retired farmer, had recently moved to Plainview. He wanted something to do with his free time, took the volunteer job, and got certified to drive the van and assist riders with disabilities.

Yet Oltjenbruns, like most rural transit operators, is “much more than just a driver,” he is a companion, according to city administrator Michael Holton. Oltjenbruns laughs as Holton praises his work. “Boy, I don’t know,” he says. “It sounds to me like I maybe should get a raise, doesn’t it?”

To access the full story, click here.

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9. Perfection or Success? Which One Will You Choose?

Don’t you love it when everything is just perfect? What if I told you that seeking perfection is one of the most common reasons why people don’t achieve their personal and professional goals. Let me tell you why…

In today’s world, you have to love perfection, or at least, that’s the story many of us tell ourselves. If we don’t, then it tells something about us. It tells the world we don’t love quality work, we’re sloppy and our standards are pretty low, and why would we want that? At the same time, doing things perfectly every time is actually great because no one can criticize perfect work. So, the best way to have our work accepted or to be accepted ourselves by others is to be perfect.

The only problem is that achieving perfection is very hard and seldom happens. Sure, if the scope of what you do is very limited, then perfection is achievable. But once you move ahead and complexity increases, or that you depend on other people or companies to do you job, then perfection happens much less often. So, aiming to be perfect every time when it actually happens very rarely is setting yourself up for regular disappointments as your goals of perfection are regularly missed. In essence, when someone wants everything about her or his life to be perfect, she or he surely wants to be perfect as well. And how realistic is it for someone to aim to be perfect when life itself is imperfect by nature…

To access the full story, click here.

10. 'Montréal Urban Ecology Centre Releases New Placemaking Tool A community-led approach is key to the success of any placemaking project. Project for Public Spaces believes this so strongly that the very first tenet listed in our 11 principles for creating great public spaces is: “The community is the expert.”

So how does this community process actually work? Engaging with this issue at length, the Montréal Urban Ecology Centre (MUEC) has published a useful guide, called Participatory Urban Planning: Planning the city with and for its citizens, which was produced with support from Québec en Forme and the Public Health Agency of Canada. Today marks the release of the guide’s English translation, following the French language version that was launched this summer.

Drawing on the work of PPS, and including other leading experts in the field such as Jane Jacobs and Jan Gehl, the text offers a thorough yet digestible outline of the participatory planning process, as well as practical advice for communities looking to activate these projects and processes for themselves.

Participatory Urban Planning does not take the idea of community-led development for granted, and there is an entire section dedicated to highlighting its value in “provid[ing] undeniable advantages when compared to conventional processes managed solely by professionals. Since citizens are in the neighbourhood every day, they can provide observations and knowledge that are different from experts, thereby enriching the analysis.”

To access the full story (and toolkit), click here.

11. To Build a Progressive Populism, Look to Farm Country With their sights now firmly trained on 2018, Democratic strategists and liberal pundits have an opportunity to re-think populism and redefine it to better include farmers and rural communities.

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Many Democrats still can’t figure out how to approach white rural residents, who are too often cast as irredeemable hillbillies responsible for the election of Donald Trump. While whiteness was the clearest predictor of a vote for Trump, it is rural and working-class whites who have been held responsible, as no one is suggesting giving up on well-off white suburban voters.

Scapegoating leaves us at a standstill. It also ignores a rich history: In the 1980s, when rural life was rapidly becoming as bleak as it is today, a perfect storm of politics and economics hit middle America, in the form of the farm crisis. In response, white Midwestern farmers emerged at the forefront of resistance to the prevailing government agenda of privatization and deregulation, fighting white supremacist groups, and partnering with labor unions and Black politicians.

Instead of demonizing the descendants of that rural-populist uprising, we need to ask: How did that happen and how can it happen again?

To access the full story, click here.

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