Monday Mailing 030419

Monday Mailing

Year 25 • Issue 24 4 March 2019 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Quote of the Week:

“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."

- Anne Bradstreet

Oregon Fast Fact #29

At 11,239 feet Mount Hood stands as the tallest peak in Oregon. Mount Hood is a dormant volcano.

Oregon Senators Pass 1st-In-Nation Statewide Rent Control (Corum Ketchum) Ohio City Votes To Give Lake Erie Personhood Status Over Algae Blooms (Emily Bradley) Which Countries Have The Most Pavement Per Person?

(Bayoán Ware) Reaching The People – Taking An Innovative Approach To Public Engagement (Corum Ketchum) Charity Is Not A Substitute For Justice (Caitlin Seyfried) Greener Childhood Associated With Happier Adulthood (Carolina Negron) Easy Payments (Patrick Lynch) The Future Is Rural: Food System Adaptations To The Great Simplification (RARE Alumni, Victoria Binning) WEBINAR – Stronger Together: Partnering With The Disability Rights Movement (Bayoán Ware) WEBINAR – Andi Crawford and Michael Hammett On Cities Leading By Engaging Citizens (Patrick Lynch)

1. Oregon Senators Pass 1st-In-Nation Statewide Rent Control The Oregon Senate voted 17-11 Tuesday to make Oregon the first state in the nation to adopt statewide rent control and make it harder for landlords to evict tenants without a reason.

Sen. Shemia Fagan, D-Portland, who recently unseated an incumbent in a race dominated by housing, opened the floor debate with a story she often told on the campaign trail: She was 15 and showed up at a large Victorian-style house in East Portland to visit her mother, who was struggling with addiction issues.

It turned out her mother lived beneath the large house, not inside.

“Instead of walking up the steps, she dropped to all fours and crawled into the porch and she invited us into her home,” Fagan told her Senate colleagues.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Ohio City Votes To Give Lake Erie Personhood Status Over

Algae Blooms

When they first started talking about doing something about the algae blooms in Lake Erie, which had made the once pristine water green and slimy and unhealthy from agricultural phosphorous runoff, people in Toledo, Ohio didn’t really know what to do.

“Sometimes it was almost like all of us were at a funeral and we felt

Page 1 of 5

we had just seen the lake die,” said Tish O’Dell, a community organizer who specializes in environmental issues.

But this week, more than four years after the devastating algae bloom in 2014 that cut off drinking water for 500,000 people, Toledo voters passed the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, a unique charter amendment that establishes the huge lake as a person and grants it the legal rights that a human being or corporation would have.

The final results weren’t even close, as it passed by a 61% to 39% margin.

Now the “rights of nature” movement is already spreading from the midwest to the rest of the US. Organizers behind the vote say they have heard from representatives of communities in Silicon Valley, counties around Salt Lake City in Utah, citizens of states surrounding the Chesapeake Bay and cities along the Atlantic coast in Maine.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Which Countries Have The Most Pavement Per Person?

One number can't begin to capture the complexity of the differences between urban places— what we build, how we build it, what it looks like, and what it's going to take to maintain it.

But sometimes, one number can cut through all the details and illuminate a fundamental truth about some aspect of our world. It's why we measure statistics like the GDP or life expectancy: they don't tell us everything we need to know, but they do tell us a part of the story.

For example, take the answer to this simple question: Which countries have the most paved surface per capita?

To access the full story, click here.

4. Reaching the People – Taking An Innovative Approach To Public Engagement

On a sunny April day about 200 cyclists of all ages spent the morning and early afternoon riding around Vista View Park in Davie, Florida. There were lessons on bicycle safety, helmet fittings and giveaways. The event, called “Let’s Go Biking,” sounds like one a cycling club might host, but it’s a regular program organized by the Broward County Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) as part of its Complete Streets Initiative.

While the event encourages people to bike for their health and to consider cycling as a transportation alternative, it also gives the MPO an opportunity to introduce itself to members of the community who may not attend a traditional public meeting. The events are also used to showcase infrastructure improvements Broward MPO is planning or has completed. And last year, after attendees checked in at the registration table, they were encouraged to take a survey about their future transportation needs as part of the planning organization’s federally required long-range transportation plan update.

Page 2 of 5

“We want to be in the community, and we want to be engaging with people,” said Erica Lychak, communications principal coordinator for Broward MPO. “This gives us a shared activity of sorts but the other thing that it does is it lets us say, ‘Hey, here’s what the MPO is actually doing.’”

To access the full story, click here.

5. Charity Is Not A Substitute For Justice

On November 15, thousands of people in San Francisco worked together to make an ailing child's wish come true. Miles Scott, a five-year-old boy recovering from leukaemia, dreamed of becoming "Batkid". At the behest of the Make-a-Wish Foundation, a charity which grants the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses, San Franciscans staged an elaborate series of events for Scott and his family. He rode in the Batmobile, rescued a damsel in distress, and received national press coverage and a personal message from President Barack Obama.

The public effort for Scott shows what a difference kindness and compassion can make for a family in need. But one of the reasons the Batkid outreach was so moving is that it is such a rare occurrence.

In an era where bad luck is mistaken for bad character, the plight of those worse off tends to be ignored or portrayed as a perverse form of retribution. Poverty becomes both a crime and its own punishment, even for children. In many US schools, a child who cannot come up with lunch money is expected to go hungry. In Texas, a 12-year-old's lunch was thrown in the trash because he could not come up with 30 cents.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Greener Childhood Associated With Happier Adulthood

The experience of natural spaces, brimming with greenish light, the smells of soil and the quiet fluttering of leaves in the breeze can calm our frenetic modern lives. It's as though our very cells can exhale when surrounded by nature, relaxing our bodies and minds.

Some people seek to maximize the purported therapeutic effects of contact with the unbuilt environment by embarking on sessions of forest bathing, slowing down and becoming mindfully immersed in nature.

But in a rapidly urbanizing world, green spaces are shrinking as our cities grow out and up.

Scientists are working to understand how green spaces, or lack of them, can affect our mental health.

A study published Monday in the journal PNAS details what the scientists say is the largest investigation of the association between green spaces and mental health.

To access the full story, click here.

7. Easy Payments

This is the Bass Pro Shops flagship store inside the Memphis Pyramid. It feels like the love child of Dolly Parton and I.M. Pei. It’s part civic icon and part retail fantasia complete with an indoor climate controlled cypress swamp. A mermaid in a seashell brassiere invites guests to a unique Page 3 of 5

family dining and entertainment experience. Seafood and bowling. Classy. If BPS, LLC had built this place themselves and financed it with their own capital in the expectation of earning a handsome profit for investors, I’d think the place was a kitschy bit of fun. Who doesn’t want to buy rubber wading boots inside a glass pyramid with an observation deck? It’s Chuck E. Cheese on anabolic steroids. Walmart with a touch of Vegas glamor. It’s worth the drive from Arkansas.

But what you’re actually looking at is well north of $100 million of taxpayer funds in the guise of a private venture. It’s subsidized and backstopped by local government from top to bottom.

To access the full story, click here.

8. The Future Is Rural: Food System Adaptation To The Great Simplification

The Future is Rural challenges the conventional wisdom about the future of food in our modern, globalized world. It is a much-needed reality check that explains why certain trends we take for granted–like the decline of rural areas and the dependence of farming and the food system on fossil fuels–are historical anomalies that will reverse over the coming decades. Renewable sources of energy must replace fossil fuels, but they will not power economies at the same scale as today. Priorities will profoundly shift, and food will become a central concern. Lessons learned from resilience science and alternatives to industrial agriculture provide a foundation for people to transition to more rural and locally focused lives.

Jason Bradford, a biologist and farmer, offers a deeply researched report on the future of food that reveals key blind spots in conventional wisdom on energy, technology, and demographics.

The Future Is Rural presents Bradford’s analysis from his career in ecology and agriculture, as well as a synthesis of the historical and scientific underpinnings of the astonishing changes that will transform the food system and society as a whole.

To access the report, click here.

9. WEBINAR: Stronger Together: Partnering With The Disability Rights Movement

(March 13 from at 10am to 11am PST)

This webinar will continue on our September Walking Towards Justice episode that explored the potential partnerships between walkability advocates and the disability rights movement. Learn how communities are becoming more inclusive and accessible and tools and resources to do the same. This webinar is intended for those just starting out on the walking path as well as those interested in learning more about the topic.

To register for the webinar, click here.

10. WEBINAR – Andi Crawford And Michael Hammett On Cities Leading By Engaging Citizens (March 6 from at 10am to 11am PST)

Join Next City for another event in our online seminar series, this time with guest presenters Andi Crawford, director of the Department of Neighborhoods and Citizen Engagement for Lansing, Michigan, and Michael Hammett, chief service officer for the City of Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday, March 6 at 1 p.m. eastern time.

Andi Crawford and Michael Hammett will share how citizen engagement became embedded in Lansing, Michigan, and Phoenix, Arizona, respectively. Through their leadership and close work with mayors, city agencies, local partners, and community stakeholders, each was instrumental Page 4 of 5

in changing the way their cities do business by making citizen engagement a core element in solving public problems. Coming from cities with different leadership structures, populations, and demographics, Michael and Andi will share best practices and lessons learned so that other cities can replicate their success.

Andi Crawford serves as the director of the Department of Neighborhoods and Citizen Engagement for Lansing, Michigan. In this role, she leads the Neighborhood Resource Team, supports the mayor in growing and enhancing strategic citizen volunteer initiatives, and delivers services to neighborhood leaders.

Michael Hammett is chief service officer for the City of Phoenix, Arizona. In this role, he directs and evaluates the implementation of a citywide service plan that engages citizen volunteers and community partners to address priority issues for the city. He also directs the City’s National Service Program and recently received an M.S. in Global Technology and Development from the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University.

To register for the webinar, click here.

Page 5 of 5