Monday Mailing
Year 24 • Issue 20 19 February 2018 1. Let Me Tell You a Story! Storytelling to Enhance Urban Planning Engagement 2. When Your City Hates Your Traffic Calming Measures 3. A Tale of Two Housing Crises, Rural and Urban 4. Oregon’s 10 Most Popular State Parks in 2017 5. Can Food Hubs Scale Nationally and Stay True to the Cause? 6. Nestlé Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For 7. Green Infrastructure Webcast Series 8. This Company May Have Solved One of The Hardest Problems in Clean Energy 9. The Economic Outlook for Millennials Is Bleak. Now They’re Unionizing in Record Numbers. 10. Today’s Rural News in 3 Words: Broadband, Broadband, and Broadband 11. Rural Food Access Toolkit 1.
Quote of the Week: “It is never too late to be what we might have been.” ~George Eliot Oregon Fast Fact: Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States. It was formed more than 6,500 years ago. Its crystal-blue waters are world renowned.
Let Me Tell You a Story! Storytelling to Enhance Urban Planning Engagement Urban planning today has become greatly contested because there is so much at stake: displacement, homelessness, income inequity, social justice, and climate change. Effective and compelling storytelling can help planners reframe planning to deal with highly sensitive urban issues in a competitive media landscape. Storytelling can help planners generate interest, understand the communities they serve, improve communication, and ultimately empower residents. Storytelling is usually human-centric; planners tell stories about places! Planners can curate urban planning by using stories and storytelling at various stages of the process:
Phase 1. Message (the people and places planners are trying to help or change) Phase 2. Communicate (the value of planning and participation) Phase 3. Empower (people to create their own places and craft their own stories)
To access the full story, click here. 2. When Your City Hates Your Traffic Calming Measures While it’s been tempting to spend the rest of my workday coming up with snarky parody responses to this video (You Paid For It: Not one but two interstate highways through your downtown, resulting in 63% population loss! You Paid For It: The Rams stadium, and look how that turned out!), I know that snark isn’t the answer. Because this journalist isn’t the first person — or even the first journalist — to talk trash on a traffic calming project that’s likely to make my neighborhood safer and wealthier. And when it comes to projects like this nationwide, he certainly won’t be the last. Page 1 of 5
This is the uncomfortable reality of the movement to #slowthecars in our human-scaled neighborhoods; all too often, drivers really, really hate being slowed down. And a lot of them will stay angry, no matter how beautifully you argue that narrowing your road makes your neighborhood immediately safer for all modes of transport — and let’s be clear, it does. There’s no magic wand that will force all your neighbors to be happy about changes to the streets they drive down every day — much less stop them from flooding the alderwoman with calls to get the “hazards” removed, especially when the nightly news is all but telling them to do it. To access the full story, click here. 3. A Tale of Two Housing Crises, Rural and Urban On a July afternoon in 2017, Joe Waukazoo, a tall and athletic 62-year-old, jaywalked across 31st Avenue in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood. He paused before the skeleton of the Ghost Ship, a warehouse-turned-artist collective, burned hollow in a blaze that took 36 lives on a December night in 2016. He stops here often to pay homage to the victims, mostly artists. “This is like a collision of two kinds of forces,” Waukazoo told me. “You got the gentrification, and you got the community.” No American place offers a clearer vantage point on that conflict than Oakland. The city is caught in a boxing match between the invisible hand of Silicon Valley capitalism and the defiant fist of Bay Area radicalism. As Ivy League-educated Millennials brandishing computer science degrees move in, rents shoot up. Investors looking to cash in on the latest California gold rush are developing properties throughout the city. Speculators want to brand West Oakland, former headquarters of the Black Panther Party, #WeOak. In East Oakland’s historically Latino Fruitvale neighborhood, the trajectory is the same. Every few blocks, a bar or restaurant has popped up to tap the wallets of the new techie settlers. To access the full story, click here. 4. Oregon’s 10 Most Popular State Parks in 2017 The Oregon Coast is king. When it comes to state parks, that is. Driven by fire in the mountains and smoke in the valley, Oregonians flocked to the beach like never before in 2017. Of the 180 state parks across Oregon, eight of the 10 most popular were on the Oregon Coast. Here’s a look at the most visited state parks from 2017, according to numbers from the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. To access the full story, click here. 5. Can Food Hubs Scale Nationally and Stay True to the Cause? At The Common Market’s 73,000-square-foot warehouse and office headquarters in North Philadelphia, a sign above the door reads, “Your Trusted Source for Local Farm Food.” Inside, however, the founders are talking about connecting farmers and consumers in far-flung places, including Atlanta (where they’ve been operating for almost two years), Houston (where they’ll open this spring), and Chicago and South Florida (which are next on the agenda).
Page 2 of 5
“We have aspirations for expanding to most of the major metropolitan areas in the United States,” says Haile Johnston, chief development officer, who co-founded this mid-Atlantic food hub with Tatiana Garcia-Granados and Robert Pierson. Common Market made its first delivery in June of 2008, when enthusiasm was taking off for the “food hub” model as a solution to rebuilding regional food economies that had been degraded by the industrialization of agriculture. Advocates began to preach the possibilities of aggregation and distribution businesses that could close the gap between those growing good food and those needing it. To access the full story, click here. 6. Nestlé Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For In rural Mecosta County, Mich., sits a near-windowless facility with a footprint about the size of Buckingham Palace. It’s just one of Nestlé’s roughly 100 bottled water factories in 34 countries around the world. Inside, workers wear hairnets, hard hats, goggles, gloves, and earplugs. Ten production lines snake through the space, funneling local spring water into 8-ounce to 2.5-gallon containers; most of the lines run 24/7, each pumping out 500 to 1,200 bottles per minute. About 60 percent of the supply comes from Mecosta’s springs and arrives at the factory via a 12-mile pipeline. The rest is trucked in from neighboring Osceola County, about 40 miles north. “Daily, we’re looking at 3.5 million bottles potentially,” says Dave Sommer, the plant’s 41-year-old manager, shouting above the din. Silos holding 125 tons of plastic resin pellets provide the raw material for the bottles. They’re molded into shape at temperatures reaching 400F before being filled, capped, inspected, labeled, and laserprinted with the location, day, and minute they were produced—a process that takes less than 25 seconds. Next, the bottles are bundled, shrink-wrapped onto pallets, and picked up by a fleet of 25 forklifts that ferry them to the plant’s warehouse or loading docks. As many as 175 trucks arrive every day to transport the water to retail locations in the Midwest. “We want more people to drink water, keep hydrated,” Sommer says. “It would be nice if it were my water, but we just want them to drink water.” To access the full story, click here. 7. Green Infrastructure Webcast Series EPA's Green Infrastructure Webcast Series is for public officials and practitioners beginning to implement green infrastructure, as well as for those looking to enhance established programs. Initiated in 2014, the series has featured leading academics and professionals from around the country sharing their expertise on a range of topics related to green infrastructure. Upcoming Webcast - Building Resilient Communities with Green Infrastructure and Hazard Mitigation Planning, March 1st from 10:00am – 11:30pm. Presenters (including our very own Josh Bruce!) will focus on two proof of concept projects cosponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), in which two communities enhanced their resiliency by integrating green infrastructure elements of their stormwater and watershed plans into their hazard mitigation plans to achieve co-benefits such as improving water quality and preserving resources. To register for the webinars, click here.
Page 3 of 5
8. This Company May Have Solved One of The Hardest Problems in Clean Energy The “hydrogen economy” may be a thing after all. It is an odd twist of chemistry that there is fuel embedded in the most common substance on earth: water. Hydrogen — the H of H2O fame — turns out to be something of an all-purpose element, a Swiss Army knife for energy. It can be produced without greenhouse gases. It is highly flammable, so it can be used as a combustion fuel. It can be fed into a fuel cell to produce electricity directly, without combustion, through an electrochemical process. It can be stored and distributed as a gas or a liquid. It can be combined with CO2 (and/or nitrogen and other gases) to create other useful fuels like methane or ammonia. It can be used as a chemical input in a range of industrial processes, helping to make fertilizers, plastics, or pharmaceuticals. To access the full list, click here. 9. The Economic Outlook for Millennials Is Bleak. Now They’re Unionizing in Record Numbers. Add one more thing to the list of retro things young Americans are rediscovering: unions. According to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, 76 percent of new union members in 2017 were younger than 35. That’s pretty significant, considering that workers 34 and under make up just 40 percent of the country’s total workforce. In short, young workers may be kicking off a trend that could strengthen a labor movement that’s been brought to its knees by decades of attacks from employers, corporations, and hostile lawmakers. These numbers represent a significant break with recent history. Younger workers have always been less likely than older ones to be unionized. This is still the case—roughly 8 percent of workers under 34 are union members, compared with around 13 percent of workers 35 and older. Yet nearly 1 in 4 new jobs among younger workers in 2017 was a union job. Recent polling suggests that today’s young workers increasingly identify with organized labor. Last year, Pew Research found that 75 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds (including 55 percent of young Republicans) have favorable views of unions—a rate far higher than that of any other age group. To access the full story, click here. 10. Today’s Rural News in 3 Words: Broadband, Broadband, and Broadband Rural connectivity is having a moment in the U.S. media spotlight. Is it just current events, or is something else going on? Something is cooking in the rural broadband kitchen this week. A steady stream of media reports about rural broadband is flowing around the internet. Of the 40some rural American stories in my regular news searches today, a third (14) are about rural broadband. I’ve never seen the like of it, and I’ve been watching these headlines for more years than I care to admit. (Let’s just say, when I started monitoring rural news, I had more hair on my head and less on my ears).
Page 4 of 5
There’s no single national event or controversy that explains the uptick in coverage. There was last month’s Federal Communications Commission’s action on rural broadband subsidies. And the FCC is also looking at spectrum issues that could involve rural areas. Last month President Trump signed a couple of executive orders that, while they didn’t hurt rural access, didn’t do much to help it either. To access the full story, click here. 11. Rural Food Access Toolkit Welcome to the Rural Food Access Toolkit. This toolkit compiles evidence-based and promising models and resources to support organizations implementing food access programs in rural communities across the United States. The modules in the toolkit contain resources and information focused on developing, implementing, evaluating, and sustaining rural food access and food security programs. There are more resources on general community health strategies available in the Rural Community Health Toolkit. To access the Toolkit, click here.
Page 5 of 5