Monday Mailing
Year 25 • Issue 19 28 January 2019 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Does Your Box Of “Ugly” Produce Really Help The Planet? Or Hurt It? (Carolina Negron) Here’s One Fight The Green New Deal Should Avoid For Now (Michael Hoch) Big Tech’s Affordable Housing Push Doesn’t Let Them Off The Hook (Patrick Lynch) Urban Planning Trends To Watch In 2019 (Corum Ketchum) ‘This Is Not Controversial’: Bipartisan Group of Economists Calls For Carbon Tax (Michael Hoch) Everything You Need TO Know About The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Emily Bradley) Hemp Has A Research Problem (Carolina Negron) Welcome to Tax Breaklandia (Michael Walker) Congress’s New Transportation Leader Wants To Make A Deal (Corum Ketchum) RESOURCE & WEBINAR – New “Playbook” Provides A Guide For How Cities Can Manage Shared Micromobility Services (Bayoán Ware)
1. Does Your Box of “Ugly” Produce Really Help The Planet?
Or Hurt It?
Startups like Hungry Harvest and Imperfect Produce say they're helping to reduce food waste in America. Critics say they're deceiving their customers and making the problem worse.
Quote of the Week:
“Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” ― Mary Oliver
Oregon Fast Fact #41
The Oregon Legislature designated the Oregon Grape (Mahonia aquifolium) as the Oregon state flower by resolution in 1899.
“I’m an environmental journalist, not an environmentalist.” I’ve said this countless times over the course of my career, usually to make a distinction between myself and the people I write about. But last year, while reporting on a growing number of climate crises, I realized I could no longer pretend that I was just a journalist. I am an environmentalist, in the sense that I believe humans should modify their behavior for the benefit of the planet. I just hadn’t acted much on that belief—until now. To access the full story, click here. 2. Here’s One Fight The Green New Deal Should Avoid For
Now
The Green New Deal has captured the public imagination, emerging from obscurity to become the talk of the town in a matter of weeks. Lots of people on the left want to draft on that grassroots energy, claiming some of it for themselves. Thus, the jockeying has begun to define the GND, to nail down exactly what it means and who is allowed to claim the banner.
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It is inevitably going to be a contentious process. As I wrote in my GND explainer, taking the GND from lofty goals to a concrete policy program will involve a broad array of difficult decisions and political challenges. Though everyone (on the left, anyway) may agree about the GND in the broadest terms — a program to address climate change that is just, fair, and adequate to the task — the minute the discussion moves a level deeper, into specifics, the battles begin. To access the full story, click here.
3. Big Tech’s Affordable Housing Push Doesn’t Let Them Off The Hook
For affordable housing developers who need to move federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit projects forward, January has been frustrating. Calls and e-mails to HUD are met with the “sorry we’re furloughed” soundtrack of the government shutdown. No one answering the phones at the Weaver Building in Washington, D.C. is a potent symbol of the depressing state of affairs for public sector responses to the U.S. affordable housing crisis. The federal lights are off, which further precludes a meaningful congressional debate about anything resembling a national housing plan or policy. Meanwhile, local elected officials heed the NIMBY interests of current constituents to block affordable housing for future residents. The end result: government and the electorate at all levels are currently proving themselves not up to the task of providing the estimated 7.2 million homes needed for families unable to afford market-rate housing. To access the full story, click here.
4. Urban Planning Trends To Watch In 2019
Before we start looking at the big urban planning trends to watch in the coming year, the "Urban Planning Trends to Watch in 2018" post is worth a quick look back for lessons in what emerged and what evolved in the world of planning and development from the previous year.
The Dismantling of Federal Bureaucracy – If you're reading this post in the future, I write this dispatch from the government shutdown of 2018-2019, a few days after President Donald Trump's historically embarrassing speech on an imagined immigration emergency and his willingness to hold the country hostage to extract ransom to fund an unnecessary border wall. 2018 could have been better: We waited months past the due date for transit funding while projects hung in the balance. Numerous cabinet members and senior staffers were unceremoniously fired, quit in scandal, or entered their jobs through less-than-Constitutionallysanctioned means. 2019 is off to a distressing start, thanks to the government shutdown that began last year. Air traffic controllers and other federal employees got their first $0 paycheck today and renter's assistance programs are at risk, threatening eviction of thousands. To access the full story, click here.
5. ‘This Is Not Controversial’: Bipartisan Group Of Economists Calls For Carbon Tax
Forty-five top economists from across the political spectrum are calling for the United States to put a tax on carbon, saying it is by far the best way for the nation to address climate change.
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“A carbon tax offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary,” the economists wrote in letter published Wednesday evening in the Wall Street Journal. They called climate change a “serious problem” that needs “immediate national action.” Nearly every Republican and Democratic chair of the Council of Economic Advisers since the 1970s signed the letter, including Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet L. Yellen, who are also former chairs of the Federal Reserve. Numerous Nobel laureates in economics also added their names. “Among economists, this is not controversial,” said Greg Mankiw, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush and signed the letter. “The politics is complicated, the international relations is complicated, but the economics is really simple." To access the full story, click here.
6. Everything You Need To Know About The Fourth Industrial Revolution
The Fourth Industrial Revolution will take center stage at the World Economic Forum's (WEF) annual meeting next week in Davos, Switzerland. The concept, a theme of Davos this year, refers to how a combination of technologies are changing the way we live, work and interact.
Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the Geneva-based WEF, published a book in 2016 titled "The Fourth Industrial Revolution" and coined the term at the Davos meeting that year. Schwab argued a technological revolution is underway "that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres." Simply put, the Fourth Industrial Revolution refers to how technologies like artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles and the internet of things are merging with humans' physical lives. Think of voice-activated assistants, facial ID recognition or digital health-care sensors. To access the full story, click here.
7. Hemp Has A Research Problem
Angela Post wasn’t supposed to study hemp. The North Carolina State University agriculture researcher focuses on small grains such as wheat and barley. But after the 2014 farm bill allowed states to investigate hemp, it became clear the seeds were lucrative. Post had the right equipment to study them, so the job was hers. At first, Post thought hemp would get as much attention as the other alternative crops she and her colleagues dabble in. “We didn’t know how fast it would grow,” she says. Once the work garnered the attention of hundreds of would-be hemp farmers, “that’s when we got a sense it was something bigger than anticipated.” Since then, Post’s work has expanded beyond hemp seeds—and her expertise—to fiber and flowers that contain cannabidiol, or CBD, which is extracted for use in seizure medications and over-the-counter tinctures. But there’s no turning down hemp studies if you’re an agricultural Page 3 of 5
researcher in one of the states where residents might want to grow the crop, including North Carolina, Vermont, and Kentucky. To access the full story, click here.
8. Welcome to Tax Breaklandia
On a wet December evening, Mark Goodman steers a black Mercedes SUV into an open-air parking lot, one of dozens of development sites his family owns across downtown Portland, Ore. This one, he says, will be a $206 million tower with ground-floor retail, six floors of offices, and more than 200 luxury apartments. Amenities will include a yoga studio and roof deck. But the centerpiece will be a swimming pool that cantilevers out of the eighth floor. “The one thing I can say absolutely with certainty—it’ll be the finest for-rent product in the city,” Goodman says. It’s also eligible for a U.S. tax break meant to help the poor. Portland is about to see a flurry of construction because of a provision in the 2017 tax overhaul that led to the creation of more than 8,700 “opportunity zones” across the country—areas that, in theory, have been ignored by investors and need generous tax breaks to catch up. But Oregon did an audacious thing: It selected the entire downtown of its largest city to be eligible for the law’s suite of benefits, as well as neighborhoods such as the Pearl District, where new high-rises loom over old industrial spaces converted into “creative” offices and boutique furniture stores sit near juice bars serving açai bowls. The Central Eastside, an area that Portland’s alt weekly crowned the city’s “best food neighborhood,” is also included. To access the full story, click here.
9. Congress’s New Transportation Leader Wants To Make A Deal
Infrastructure is finally at the center of U.S. political discourse. But debates about the border wall aren’t what Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio, the new chairman of the House’s transportation and infrastructure committee, wants to talk about. He wants to sound the alarm about the backlog of repairs fueling an economic—and environmental—crisis. “If we don’t make these investments, we’re going to become more carbon-intensive, in terms of transportation, and have the potential for economic catastrophe when something like the tunnels under the Hudson River go down,” says DeFazio. “I’m going to approach it from a very hard-hearted way: Boy, you’re stupid if you don’t make these investments.” DeFazio has spent much of his career working on bipartisan plans to boost spending on important transportation projects. He takes control of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee during a pivotal time, when technology advances, long-term funding issues, and climate change demand a comprehensive, forward-thinking plan. To access the full story, click here.
10. RESOURCE & WEBINAR– New”Playbook” Provides A Guide For How Cities Can Manage Shared Micromobility Services (Jan.29 @ 12pm PST)
Produced in collaboration with 23 cities, Transportation for America released a new “Playbook” to help cities think about how to best manage shared micromobility services like dockless bikes, Page 4 of 5
electric scooters, and other new technologies that are rapidly being deployed in cities across the country. View the complete Playbook at http://playbook.t4america.org Join us on Monday January 28th at 3:00 p.m. EST for an online session explaining the Playbook, how to use it, and how members of the Collaborative helped shape the content. Over just the past few years, shared micromobility services (scooters, bikes and others) have exploded in cities across the country, transforming the mobility landscape and challenging the ability of cities to manage them. Since the initial introduction of dockless bikesharing systems in Seattle in the summer of 2017, dozens of companies have rapidly launched their services in hundreds of cities, served thousands of users and completed millions of rides—in just a little over a year. “The rapid emergence of these new micromobility services has created new clean and convenient options for people to get around, and they certainly offer a wealth of potential benefits. But there’s still so much to learn,” said Russ Brooks, T4America’s Director of Smart Cities. To learn more, click here.
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